YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL ME YOU DON'T CARE

YOU DON’T NEED TO TELL ME YOU DON’T CARE

You don’t need to tell me you don’t care, not caring

is an environmental condition since humans became

too dangerous to trust their own minds as the world,

let themselves be morning doves in the phoenix-fire of the sumac,

or a light within a light like a planet in the dusk,

the pink lilac of Mercury, the flashing white

gardenia of Venus. Killing only lets you be

one thing else

after you’ve deleted all the rest. Not caring

is the shape of a final heart, the rose recast by the minerals

as stone, cell by cell, nest by nest, petrified

by the cuckoo whose young shoulder the eggs of its host out

like refugees that take over the government

that gives them shelter. Not caring

is an ancient battlefield in the morning

where crows and old women, idiots, wretches, dogs

plunder the dead lying like islands in the mist,

a cemetery of maggots that froze before

they could finish eating the horse. Not caring

is deciding to live without punctuation

because everywhere you went something got in your way

like crosswalks or streetlights, your desire for precious metals,

to drink the silver pure, frustrated everywhere

by the corroded goblets and encrustations

of people who smiled like ores and tons of granite. Not caring,

is a leftover of porous slag and a gaping quarry,

and the gifts of not caring are always accidental

and come wrapped in the skins of old enemies, a relic of fangs

that fell out like the phases of the moon

when the new ones with their upgraded toxins appeared.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care,

I’ve lived under glaciers long enough to know

the knives of the small arctics that plunge through the heart

like kingfishers never cry; I know

the striations of stone eyes

that leave their runic watermarks

like scars and coats of arms on a shield, how

the polar caps can descend down over a skull

for thousands of years and the people revert to hides.

Not caring is a moth-eaten charter

of inalienable human blights;

chained like a telephone book to the left side

of a junkie Medusa that sold Pegasus to a riding academy

for the last hit to take off her head

long before Perseus showed up like a rehab centre.

Not caring is a way of saying

the world has let you down like an elopement

you once waited for all night at a window

when windows were made of water,

and it was an eclipse of everything you loved,

not the moon with its ladder

that came for you, the world, a foot in the door

of the opening lotus. The scarlet runner

of the iron in your blood

turned to rebar in cement to reinforce

the dead meteor of the foundation stone

that crashed through your celestial ceiling

as if God had personally thrown a rock at you

and killed your peacock in an avalanche of eyes.

Here’s a bit of not caring, here’s

the splinter of a black dwarf

that will add a little gravity to your requiem: boo hoo.

But who could mean it; who so foolish,

watching your blood-drenched weathervane

beating wingless in the air, the harbinger

of a past catastrophe, to foul the summer wind

that runs schools of stars like fish into the nets

of the auroral curtains gusting across the night sky

with a blizzard of vindictive spiders?

Everywhere the abdomens and sulphurous bouquets

of burnt match-heads. A still-life with webs.

The mummifed embryo of an aborted afterlife

and an umbilical cord undone

like a shoelace in a coffin. Not caring

is a black hole with an event horizon

that is a one-way threshold, the edge of the flat earth,

the useless wing of a collapsed dimension,

a climacteric of cannibals.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;

turn the rock of the world over in most,

shine a light in the corners between

the rafters in the damp basement, and you’ll see

a Nazi who wears black, kid leather gloves and breezy colognes

when he mutilates, Aryan bird wheels of destruction

frozen like galaxies and desecrated flowers in metal

arranged logically on the iconic desktop

of his universally translatable uniform, and this

is a man who doesn’t care, and this is a long, black, centipede;

and you’ll see his aspiring counterpart, a soldier

closer to home, a Chilean carabinero,

a mighty man with a can of gasoline and a condom

and a brutalized woman from the university

he rapes and burns at the side of the road back to his family,

the irisless eyes of two periods for proof he has fangs

and knows how to use his glands and organ

like a sun-tanned mamba in shades; and this

is a man who doesn’t care, and this, his machismo aside,

is a red army ant washing the general’s dirty underwear

like nettles in formic acid as he boils to be someone.

And over there, with headphones on, saline drips pumping

psychotic punk hormones through his neuronic circuitry

like flame-throwers in an air-conditioned ideology

that’s convinced it’s a tank in the deserts of Iraq,

is the boy next door who’s just made burgers and fries

of a five thousand year old Arab village

immolated like the villain of a video-game, all in the name

of a democratic republic that injects its mutable eggs

into the body of the living host

they will liberate, imperialize, and devour, and this

is a man who doesn’t care, a large, black wasp

trying to win the tiger stripes of a killer bee.

And there where the rat died dehydrated by an industrial poison,

if you look closely, beneath the sleek, moist pelt,

that puts a new spin on infestation, you’ll see

a tiny thing that calls itself a multinational corporation,

no bigger than a comma with a decimal head,

a reflex of life with the pituitary glands of a giant

who claims to own the rain in Bolivia, the arm pits

of western Africa, the people of Belize,

the grain belt of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta,

food, medicine, animals, diseases, fossils, oil, minerals, ore, genes

and the child labour of millions anywhere

there’s a dumpster with a constitution

that can’t borrow enough from the swine at the trough to eat; and this

is a legally verifiable person who doesn’t care, not a man,

but a maggot that lives in the nose

of the living and the dead like a merger in the boardroom

of a wounded world where everything is either

custard or pus. You don’t have to tell me you don’t care.

You didn’t care in Armenia, Dachau, Palestine, Sabra

and Shatila, Cambodia, Chile, Tienanmin Square, Kent State, Watts,

Wounded Knee, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, Manchuria, Tibet,

Siberia, El Salvador, Belfast, Uganda, Argentina, Sudan and the Balkans,

and you don’t care now that there are children

with hep-C and aids who sell their bodies

like golden chariots in the sewer to support a habit

they learned on lullaby knees like a crutch or a church.

You don’t have to tell me you don’t care;

I can see the homeless everywhere treated like the broken glass

of an emergency someone eventually pulled

as a messed-up prank on the moon;

and the afflicted, the lonely, the addicted, the dispossessed and the aggrieved

hoping to leak out of what was crushed like wine

as the last paint rag of hope to staunch the wound

unspools like a rainbow on an oilslick

and agrees against the colour of their own eyes

that the best of dreams is just

a momentary refraction of black;

but you don’t have to tell me you don’t care,

I can hear the shriek of your non-existence

unplugging the tree from the fruit, the sun from the sky,

the star from the vine, the river from the sea everywhere

until all that’s left to excavate is a grave in the air

for the blown lightbulb that can’t weld back

the merest filament of its own severed lifelines.

PATRICK WHITE

IF ALMOST ANY LEAF WILL DO

If almost any leaf will do to prove

the autumn is a flying carpet, then why should you doubt

my heart is a chainsaw buried on the moon with honours

after the last tree was felled, or the sun is the ultimate dumpster

for raving comets in decaying orbits

that want to thaw and cry and unspool the radical rivers

locked in straitjackets and handcuffs of ice, at least once

before they’re extinquished on the windowsills

of voyeuristic telescopes, wear

gardenias in the cold fire of the long hair they rinse in the light

after dyeing their carbon tresses blue? You ask

what ails me, why I won’t publish the silence

I keep revising like the first draft of a broken windowpane,

why I keep trying to root the lightning

in the cloud bed of a quick northern garden

like orchids in a storm, and I have nothing to say but skulls

that fall like apricots and exemplary moons

whose eyes were excavated by the crows

as a warning to anyone who wants to approach your throne like rain.

And it’s not the falling, it’s not the ashes and the mangled weathervanes,

the impact craters, and the trembling omens,

the salted soil and the astringencies of bitter wells

that taste of ancient snakes

that have installed me like a wary camera

in the bedlam of this mood, it’s not the people who arrive,

wave after wave like oilspills and messages in a bottle

written in blood that shrieks when you let them out

like birds from a furnace, it’s not

the endless misspelt preludes to suicide

that keep coming up like dawn

over the sleepless cities in the all-night restaurants

or the blank cheques of the children cancelled

by the dirty needles of the toe-tagged bloodbank,

those are shales of sorrow that have long lain heavy

on the fossil of my heart like crushed bells, those

are the startled eyes of roadkill

along the highways of the spring

when the perennial ambulance blooms like a white lily,

the suffering almost seasonal; but it’s not that,

I can handle that, they’re old sirens fused to harbour rocks

like foghorns that lost their voices years ago

and though I concede I’ll never be enough of a lifeboat

to rescue all the sharks from the people in the water,

and do what I can with what’s left of my buoyancy,

my devastation rarely turns dysfunctional,

and I can handle that for the sake of those who might need me;

but when you ask a poet what’s wrong like a yellow journalist

or the Red Cross in Auschwitz,

or the bleached nurse that books the car accidents into emergency,

the blossom disables the fruit, and what can anyone say

as the gray ashes of the crematoria fumaroles

appall the human orchards with baby-faced insecticides?

PATRICK WHITE

IT’S NOT MAD

It’s not mad to ask directions from the lightning

and these clouds and roads of unknowing

that unravel like threads of blood

in the refutable hands of time, not mad

to follow the wind anywhere like the blind

or someone in love. Follow the feathers, the leaves,

the weathervanes of the flowers, the lifelines

on the palms of your hands that go nowhere

you haven’t already been, it’s all the same eventually:

there’s nowhere to go, just the going.

And there are crossroads of the mind

and intersections of the busy heart

with clocks in uniforms timing the traffic

that still can’t tell you where things begin and start,

or if you’re progressing backwards into behind.

And there are voices you can trust to lead you like streams

out of your lostness, and books, and maps, and dreams

and stars over the endless horizons of eyelids and hills

that end in themselves like shoes and roots.

Sometimes I wish I were a stone or a gatepost

or footprints on the moon of someone else,

or a stamp on a loveletter that went along for the ride

or a fish in the nets of the rain

dragging their gowns across the fields,

a firefly snagged in the curtains of a stranger’s face

or a key aloof as a locker in a midnight bus-station.

I wish I had a heart that knew what all its flowing

was about, or a birthmark bound for greater things,

and there are rosaries of geese heading south

and wandering planets that never seem to stray

and highways and rivers that make it through the day

without confusion, and people with a compass for a mouth

that I’ll just never be, never quite manage to be.

I asked a solitude at zenith once in transit

if I could share her circles like a shadow

and walk beside her with a thought for tomorrow,

but she raised a finger to the lips of her silence

and it ended that way in a commotion of waves

that carried me all the way back to shore on their shoulders

and left me on the beach of an island of infinite sorrows

where I began, a message in a bottle, a star in a canning jar.

I’ve always said my address is here and now

but lately I think I’ve been going around the bend,

madness on point, and only this starless darkness for a guide.

And maybe someone could find me if I were to hide

and maybe there’s a needle snaking through the grass

to show me there’s a way of knowing first from last

and which goblet of the desert to drink from in an hourglass.

PATRICK WHITE

ARE YOU SAD

for Alysia

Are you sad, mauled like a morning web

by the shadows of things that were said

to make the candle sorry

it couldn’t shine on alone,

the ray of its affection

lavish with the light of a life

that isn’t a star in a vault of bone?

Strangers in the doorway,

love-letters without a home

that knock like footprints in a blizzard

to marrow the telephone

that no one ever answered

with a voice as raw as gold,

are you sad, are you cold,

is there a dolphin and a wound

between the spaces of the secrets

that mend their nets on the moon?

Oceans in the rose of night,

and poppies in the starfields

that burn like distant nebulae

with all the radiant reasons why

the heart is a better swimmer

than a lie with exits of its own

and when we cry it’s always summer

and keys on a chain in the grass

that fall like cherries and chance.

Are you sad, is there a silence

in the eye of the storm that advances

like a bird that is new to the distance

between the green boughs and the dead,

and bells that kneel in a watershed

to appeal the lightning’s chandeliers,

the roots of an unknown flower

or a sword with a severed head?

Are you sad, alone with the alone;

is there a coast on the verge of tears,

and someone bleeding the starfish

and a ghost on a borrowed throne?

PATRICK WHITE

ARE YOU BORN YET

Are you born yet, you who will understand this
when I have receded like a wave into the foam
of oncoming stars, no more than a cachet
of this remote flowering in the darkness,

one man’s indeterminate attempt

to carry the cherished fire

of his own indefensible humanity

like lightning in a battery

with umbilical cables and fangs

to jumpstart yours in a dark, cold time

that hasn’t happened yet? Are you there sometime

up ahead beyond this boundless falling

ignorantly pure and ferocious as I was

springing out of the nebular hypothesis of your own breath

like a tiger of light on the jugular of the judas-goat

life chains to a wounded cross of southern stars to catch you,

the crux australis of the issue? How many times

have I pictured you in the albums of futurity

tracking these words of mine back to me

in the lair of this particular day

trying to anaesthetize its own wounds

with the cleansing pyre of an antiseptic tongue?

This very moment that’s already gone

I imagine you glaring out of an overgrowth

of brindled shadows, arrogant and uncompromising,

the brutal judge of your own earthly excellence,

hunting alone, or trying to unmarrow

the message in the bones I’ve left

like gold in a bottle of ore, fireflies in a grave,

or a constellation in a folder of night skies

stamped for the black crescents of your eyes only,

these prophecies of chaos that only you can true

to the book of changes I leave you.

If you are young when you come to these skulls

like rain to the headstones around the ashes of old fires,

respect what must be you in time as well

as if it were your own reflection erased like a phoenix

from the gaping mirrors of witless carbon

that are all that remains of anyone’s renown,

the black dwarfs of a critical collapse of light.

But if you are old and marooned

on a glassblown island in a barefoot desert

when you stumble across these shoes in the dark

I’ve sent on ahead like the footprints

of who and where I might have been, don’t hesitate

to put them on like an urgent journey

to the circlet of the western fish

and dance your way back upstream

into the star shed of the oasis eyes

that spawned you from a dream,

your gray flesh restored, as it is today,

to the salmon rose of dawn, to the secret spring

of the key I buried like an equinox in Pisces

as an antidote to my own September crisis.

PATRICK WHITE

FLYAWAY WOMAN

Flyaway woman with a blue ladybug for a heart,

I am not your firetruck, or the glass wishbone you break

in case of an apple emergency when you split

like the seedcase of an eyelid into the angelic smear

of an orchid of smoke with dangerous doves for hands.

Leave me alone to the night that goes on in the depths

of the praeternatural river that threads the eye of the bridge;

and the fish that brain the darkness with the constancy

of thoughts and emotional lightbulbs

that keep tripping over their hairtrigger traplines

trying to illuminate their destiny

in the palm of the sceptical lightning

who does a bad imitation of God. Flyaway woman,

I could love the way you smile as if

you had a mouthful of coffin nails

and wanted to board the world up with plywood

so you could live like a rose in a hurricane

without blowing the sandbox cities

of the peninsular children away. Flyaway woman, tell me,

is your heart an orange in the fridge with green sunspots,

your body a ship that left yesterday

riding low in the water with a hold full of broken jewelry

to trade with the illegal immigrants

who would sell you a continental gram

for a single bead of rapture? Flyaway woman,

why keep the past alive in an album of angry mirrors,

and grieve like a wounded doe

all tangled up in a constellation of razorwire

waiting for someone to put you out of your misery,

when there’s more silence

in one of the moist plums of your accusing eyes

than there is the space the galaxies

douse their torches in? Flyaway woman,

I am not an arsonist in heat

with a bouquet of wooden matches

and a ragged doll of gasoline,

standing on your threshold with the smile

of a late-breaking headline. There’s no doubt

you’re a foreign queen

in a tormented hive of black honey, but I am not

the sticky bear that’s come to maul your secret bees.

I have my solitudes and voices that speak to me

like cemetery shovels just like you; and I know the terror

of being suddenly overturned by a sudden squall

on an ocean of seaworthy love-letters just like you.

And it’s true that life is often an S.O.S. in a soggy bottle

the keeps washing up at your feet in the morning

like a dead octopus in a kissing booth,

and there are watermelons full of razorblades

who come on like the dawn

and toads of lust who ask you to lick their backs

to craze you with a vision of angels rotting like sheets.

I can’t deny the world’s a house on fire

and there are slimy organizations of algae

that go from whore to whore,

asking you to write off your life

as a charitable donation

to child pornography; I cannot say the world’s a nun,

or there aren’t scars and skidmarks on the moon

from previous landings, forks

that strike like vipers at the olives in a nest,

but, flyaway woman, I am not your nemesis,

I am not the intellectual coathanger

that wants to tear the embryo out of your belief in me.

I live in the dark with terrible imaginings

and a raped ambulance that asks me

to get the lily of her siren to the hospital

for a blood test to prove we die in jest,

and I can’t recall how many dreams ago

the surgical swans and torn peonies

last came for a change of dressings,

the effusions of neglected roses

bruising the return addresses on their unbound bandages,

but flyaway woman, there’s an eclipse in my chest,

a crow in a furnace

trying to peck its way out like a spear,

and small scorpions of doubt

rehearsing requiems of bleached fire

on the keyboard of my feelings like treble clefs,

and I am without wings

in the eternal pause of a comma

that wants to create the world anew from a maggot of light.

PATRICK WHITE

I HAVE NEVER SAID

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant stars, not meant soft green lanterns, not

meant the light coming out of the dark

and fireflies on a windy summer night by a black lake

or the lamp that draws the doe out of the shadows

or the moon drunk quicksilver in the inebriated window

warping its image through the delusional weeping

of dirty winter glass signed like a guestbook

by everybody’s tears, inside and out, and this

still the case though I’m old enough to know

all that crying never turned into a single chandelier

and sad ink’s a bigger liar thread for thread

than the dyes of joy that colour the whole head hopeful.

And I have lain like an island of flesh in a coven of candles

beside cool dolphins with seabird hands

off the coast of my longing, and marvelled

at the amazing bridges of their bodies

and how they nudged my shipwrecked heart ashore.

I have never said to anyone that I loved them

and not meant the mountain ribbon of a bloodstream

that could fill to the brim the infinite cosmic goblet

of an eye, emptier than a telescope dying of thirst

in a desert of stars, with the wine of its endless flowing;

never said I love you to a tree or a door or a cat

or the chain of footprints I drag through the snow like the past

and not meant some era of a woman

who came and stayed awhile with me

in the desolate shadows of a late afternoon apartment

like the first rising of a second moon

I could live on alone in a garden of skulls and fountains.

And even when I draw the suicidal hypotenuse

of love’s last crescent across my left wrist

to bury myself in an alma mater of unsanctified ground,

having given a hand to the death of a savage passion,

or swept my continental vision off the table

back into the coffin like an archipelago

of missing jigsaw pieces, 
more vacancies than a honeymoon hotel

everytime I try to assemble it, I still know

even if it isn’t vouched to me,

that love is life, and life is a bride

that walks to the altar of her mysterious sacrifice alone,

trailing her ancient veil of stars

along this endless road of ghosts, and somehow

even when I’m the corpse of a fox in the ditch

among the white, sweet, wedding clover,

having been struck from the glare of her highbeams,

it is always somehow strangely okay

and foolishly worth it.

PATRICK WHITE